Short Stories
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Amelia Earhart Sees (Elegiac visions of the next world in the depths of the Pacific)
The silver skin of her Electra reflects the setting sun. The twin engines hum, steadfast lift is provided by the wings. The strange invisible waves of the radio beacon fly out across the ocean, far faster than the plane itself. Here among the tiny green islands and endless blue waters are beasts that wait in dark places.…
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MOOD INDIGO: STORIES NOW AVAILABLE
A new collection of short fiction by your’s truly is now available through the evil capitalists at Amazon here: Moon Indigo This collection spans a decade of output and includes both short stories and pieces of micro fiction, or flash fiction depending on your opinion. Many of these stories have appeared online in different magazines/journals,…
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See Dinosaurs as Real as Life!
It was the sound of mastication that really set her off. The nerve-wracking squanch squanch of the brachiosaur’s curved white teeth echoed loudly in the primordial setting of jungle ferns. “Why is this stupid thing so loud?” The curator turned to look at her, eyes just slightly squinting. “Ma’am, the brachiosaur was an herbivore, our recreation is…
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Warehouse
“Goddamnit’s hot!” reverberated through the alleyway. It was hot, over 90 degrees – if the thermometer he toted around in his old Woodman’s Market shopping cart could be trusted. He trusted so little these days. The red brick buildings stood around him, silent and sturdy. Unlike most of the city, they would last for decades…
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Under the Stairs
Stale perfume hangs in the air. An unseen individual traveling on her own path had sent it in overlapping currents, commingling with the nitrogen and oxygen I inhale. Its aerosolized molecules becoming time machine components, building real-time olfactory portraits of the past in my brain. I was sitting in my office cubical, now instantaneously, I…
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Enigma VI {part 1}
The icepack cracked suddenly, reminder of the megatons of frozen nitrogen doing its inexorable slow march across Tombaugh Regio. The lander from Pluto Expedition VI stood safely on the granite-hard shelf of water ice overlooking the glaciers, its ultra-bright spotlights shining on a lone figure making its way over tumbled chunks of ice painted pink…
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Pink Granite
I always found her there, sitting in the dark quietly sweating in front of her ancient, browning air conditioner. The slowly brightening tip of her lit cigarette belied her breathing. Somehow she kept doing it no matter the medical condition: Arthritis, emphysema, heart failure, laryngeal cancer – those filtered sticks would be burning in her…
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Aldrin Waits
The sheets were purity white, blameless. Two hands lying atop the crisp linen folds; gnarled, purple veins, arthritic, with brown spots as numberless as a Dalmatians riding a Fourth of July firetruck. Under eyelids jittering, sunken eyes move in REM motions; emotions, vibrations, oxygen levels, fuel warning indicators, alarms. It’s a tight fit with…
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Player Piano
There was a tinkling in the parlor, the cat had run across the keys of the old player piano. It had stood there against the wall for so many decades that you could still see the yellow daisies on the wallpaper hidden behind it. It smelled like ancient timber and rust and great-grandma’s Pall Malls.…
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Welcome to the Machine
It was a red-letter day in the history of science. They had come to the Artificial Intelligence laboratory by the dozens; each of them one of the greatest minds from nearly every field of human intellectual endeavor. Here they congregated to participate in the penultimate Turing test of the Google Omni-Device™, the world’s most advanced…
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Poe in a Flash
This story was composed live on Twitter as a sort of “flash fiction” test. I think it turned out well. He shrugged off his black overcoat and turned to peer at himself in the looking glass. “This is what I have become,” he mutters, “dead.” He pushes back his thinning black hair, the high…
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Mars 3
The sun sets on the lowest tide Mars had ever seen. Small creatures clung to the basaltic rocks and waved tiny flagella at that distant star, almost as if that plaintive gesture of goodbye would allow for one more perfect day. Now, the ebb and flow of the stinging, salted seas was waning. Their dark…
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What Really Happened…
Eve looked slightly suspicious, “You’re telling me that eating something as simple as this fruit would give me, and by extension, all of my decedents-the knowledge of good and evil; notions which at this point I certainly have no conception of?” Lucifer looked her over from the crown of her wavy brown hair, looked into…
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What is and Should Never Be
This is a short “worst-case scenario” vision of America’s possible future. For an even more compelling and plausible take, please read Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right…
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The Revisionist
Temporarily lost in space and time
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A Warm Place to Eat
Illustration for my story, A Warm Place to Eat.
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The Name of the Band
You can’t imagine what it was like then: the girls screaming their heads off, the boys throwing the girls out of the way to get a closer look at how our hands formed the chords. Sweat pouring off of all of our faces, the beat and the heat combining powerfully to change the chemistry of…
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Ablaze
There is a smell in old paper that causes a sensory echo once inhaled, slinging minds backwards in time to drift down the Nile past limestone pyramids baking in hot, dry sunlight; where papyrus grows and the laughter of deep tanned children rings out over the distant shallow whipping of slaves hauling stones for a…
The Numinous Cosmos 